Visual Studio Feature Request – Statement Outlining

If you write .NET code using Visual Studio 2005 or 2008, you’ve probably noticed the automatic outlining the IDE makes available to you. This automatically creates collapsible sections in your code for comments, regions, functions, properties, namespaces, classes, and the using block.

While this is a great feature and one that I use on a daily basis, it would be great if this extended to automatically outlining control structures, such as if/then, while loops, for/foreach loops, try/catch blocks, etc.

The purists out there might argue that if you need this collapsibility then your code is too long…and they are probably right. However, the purist point of view is not always a pragmatic one. There are numerous times where being able to collapse a long try/catch block or a large case statement would have been very helpful.

If you want to see this feature added to an upcoming release of Visual Studio, be sure to vote for the feature request on Microsoft Connect.